Selkie168

Amanda's reactions actually surprised me a little. I sketched panel four with more of an "exclamation" expression, but it didn't look right no matter how I drew it. Tried a few other expressions, and this is the one that felt right to me.

If a child or a person asks to take the punishment for somebody else…typically there are some major reasons for that. Depressing though it may be to think of it this way, that was perhaps the most painful punishment one could manage towards Heather. Especially given that Keisha would have been…while not nice about it, at least calmer then Amanda (Oh dear goodness I’m horrible with names, I had to read the transcript to make sure who was who), who I can imagine will not let this sit…against Heather, anyway, even if she -did- admit it and did do all of this to attempt to re-establish ties with the rest of her little group of friends. No matter what is said further, this is…perhaps, the most devastating part. Nothing hurts as much as failing to save the martyr.

The ‘yip-yip’ reminded me of Appa ….
I hate to admit it, but I have to – I read it and thought, it’s cuz she’s black isn’t it? XD As a minority myself, I always wonder why certain things happen … poor Keisha! And Amanda is so flighty with how she sees other people it’s always a surprise to see who she’s in the mood to like. ^^

More likely it was simply because she was the one holding the shirt when the teachers finally noticed it. A bad principal will take that as pure guilt without bothering to look any further, regardless of ethnicity. Being a white guy sure never protected me from that kind of stupidity.

I’ve never given any consideration to the minority races in Selkie, because they’re so obviously not an issue. Heck, Selkie is another species entirely, and she fits in just fine (bullying happens regardless of race too). I treat real people this way too – the colour of their skin/shape of eyes/whatnot is just part of what they look like, not who they are.

I am guessing the attempt to explain will happen in the principal’s office. One reason is the some of the pressure will be off not being in front of the whole class. And if one of the other kids is the ring leader, you can get them away from them and try to get an honest answer that will be “just between us.”

A smart authority figure will keep that incident just between them and let the ring leader believe the other person wasn’t a snitch, but they will keep their eyes and ears open for more incidents and react to those more actively knowing there is already a pattern that needs to be stopped.

Since Keisha is a bully to Selkie, there is no reason Selkie should think it’s not her. We only just saw that she DOES have some boundaries, but they don’t know that. Heather seems to be the person who actually would do the worst things, but only for the approval of others and she’ll probably go too far. She’s seems to be the one that the group would make the dirty work. Sad thing is, she could be a nice kid, but she tries too hard to get Amanda’s approval. Amanda is the ring leader and theres no telling how far she would go….I honestly don’t think she’d see just how horrible what she does is UNLESS she physically hurt Selkie in a way that went beyond just a bruise or scratch…as for something like Selkie cry….it would either delight her or make her feel guilty but would never admit it.
As much as I dislike Amanda, I do admire her loyalty to defend Keisha….although, that’ll vanish if Keisha gets adopted.

Reminds me of the time me and another kid were explaining something to our mothers. I don’t even remember what the issue was, but I do remember specifically that no one was contradicting anyone and it was the sort of thing where one or the other of us might have decided to shift blame but we didn’t. So what’s the other kid’s mother’s reaction? “Oh well, I guess we’ll never know the truth.”

I was SO ANGRY. Just accusing everyone involved of lying without the slightest reason to do so, and then dismissing the issue on the presumption NOT that we were telling the truth (because there wasn’t any contradiction) but that we were LYING for NO REASON. At the time it felt like the most unjust thing in the world. Like: WHY would we both decide to lie about this conflict in such a detailed manner? There was no time to come up with a story like that! Plus, it wasn’t the sort of thing where we would have shared blame if we were lying about it: one or both of us would have tried to accuse the other of being completely at fault! We shared the blame because we were both at fault and both independently decided to own up!

I mean: neither of us were punished in the end, but having our honesty denigrated for no good reason felt far worse than the punishment we otherwise likely would have.

On the plus side I think she’ll learn from this. I think she understands now that doing terrible things is not the way to earn friends. She’ll try that much harder to be a good person in light of what she has to make up for.
Or she’ll become so isolated that the emotional pain will make her even more vindictive than Amanda. Let’s hope its the former lol

This teacher (and Jessie) has known these kids for all of half a day. There’s no way they could know all the social dynamics yet. So, for better or worse, the obvious (which in this case is false) gets taken into consideration first.

Alas, this kind of plot line is one of the few that I rarely ever believe. When I was in school, adults were very accommodating and never did things like “oh, we know you’re lying, now fess up” or something. I’m not sure responsible people do that, especially responsible teachers. They sat people down and had a discussion, not looked for a scapegoat. Every teacher I’ve ever had would have given Keisha time to explain. “We caught her red-handed” implies that they have already come to a conclusion and anything Keisha says is completely useless. I see this kind of thing in movies, and it always looks over the top to me.

You encourage me tremendously, Dawn! I’m delighted you never had to put up with this kind of thing. My schooldays go back to the seventies in the South Wales Valleys, and things were possibly different then.

Regrettably I can supply similar incidents from memory. The teachers of my acquaintance were very much of the type illustrated.

I’ve had a few teachers who have done this – gone for the most obvious suspect and left the rest out of consideration – but I’ve also had some teachers smart enough to go for the source; in this situation they would’ve taken Amanda and Heather too, to get to the bottom of the issue.

She doesn’t know much about kids, does she? I’ve seen kids make up stories on a regular basis to get each other out of trouble, but said stories NEVER implicate themselves. The end goal isn’t to shift blame, it’s to make sure that *nobody’s* in trouble when it’s over.

Sadly I’ve seen situations where a kid would lie to take the blame. If you’ve got a “queen bee” in the class and one of the kids is a hanger on, just on the fringes of the popular group, it’s not that unusual to see them jump to take the blame in the hopes of pleasing the “queen” and ensuring a spot in the clique.

Student teachers are really important, yeah. Like I said, I do like the Jessie – the character is really interesting – but ignoring other information that comes up is quite the bias. I taught for four years, and I would be LIVID if I caught a student teacher in this situation making that kind of assumption.

The trouble is, Jessie has additional information — Heather’s stammering confession — but she’s too inexperienced to realize she should take it seriously. Mina probably would have paid attention, but she’s not there and doesn’t know.

So plot complications will ensue until either Jessie thinks to mention what the kids said, or Heather gets up the nerve to confess to a more perceptive adult. Or… it won’t get cleared up, Keisha will be unfairly punished, and the kids will all have to deal with the emotional fallout. After thinking it over, I’m guessing it’ll be the latter, because that will have the biggest impact on the class’s social relationships.

“We caught her holding Selkie’s shirt, therefore, she must have taken it,” ignores basically everything that we know about inductive reasoning, since it ignores other ways in which Keisha could have come to possess the shirt. Jessie may as well have concluded, “We caught her holding a batarang, therefore, she must be Batman.”

Actually it’s a bit more than that. Inductive reasoning would suggest that the most likely culprit is a female (since the theft occured in the girls bathroom) and Keisha is part of the clique that habitually picks on Selkie. It’s not that great of a stretch to assume that she is the culprit when spotted holding the shirt.

That’s basically how school discipline works. “Something is stolen. X has the stolen thing. Therefore X stole it.” There will be no investigation, no attempt to find out what really happened. Kiesha will be punished, and likely quite harshly, for something she didn’t do. School discipline isn’t designed to be fair. It’s designed to be fast, and designed to involve as little actual thought as possible.

Unfortunately Jim, I have to agree with you. When I was in the fifth grade, a lot of the kids in my class were into coloring at lunch. However, the boxes for the markers were not well designed and one day some markers fell out when we were walking back to class. Since I was in the back of the line, I chose to help to pick them up. When my teacher finally realized we were delayed and came back to find us, we had just finished pick up the markers and were talking a little while we hurried to catch up to the rest of the line. She promptly accused all of us for talking in line, shushed us when we tried to speak, and then punished us without so much as a shred of evidence against us. This was the same woman who said that the first amendment existed, but we still could be punished for speaking out against her as we had to “take responsibility” for what we said, AKA, she would snap at us like nobody’s business.

… Sorry for the rant, but teachers like that just really get under my skin. I can’t stand anyone who bases conclusions off of faulty evidence. Just saying, yes there are teachers this bad, and I have seen them.

I have to admit teachers make some of the dumbest decisions sometimes…when I was little, I noticed that when my table put their craft supplies back, they did it messily and just shoved them into the box on our table. I made the ‘mistake’ of deciding to dump everything out and reorganize it neatly. My classmates told on me, saying I was messing with the crafts and ruining their organization of everything. For that, I lost my recess that day. -_- I was upset about it all week.